Release Me (New Haven Series #3)

by J.L. Seegars

“You finally found the thing you didn’t even know you were looking for,”

“Which part of what happened this weekend bothers you more? The violence or the fact that it was done in your name? Because I can promise you that I’ll never be violent towards you, but I can’t say that I’ll never be violent for you.”

With Sebastian in my life, I don’t have to face anything alone. He treats every concern, issue or minor inconvenience like a hurdle for us to jump together, an obstacle for us to face head on and hand in hand.

“You seem to be under the impression that you’re not the most precious thing in my life. There is no end to the list of things I want to have with you and give to you, chief among them is time. Time to heal. Time to trust. Time to prepare your heart for what mine wants to ask of it.” The pad of his thumb swipes over my bottom lip, and he drops my gaze to trace the motion with his eyes. “How could you ever think I don’t want you around after all the things I’ve done to keep you in my orbit?”

I go willingly, shifting my weight from the balls of my feet to my knees so that I’m kneeling in front of her. It feels right, assuming this position of reverence, demonstrating my desire to worship her. It’s the only place I’ve wanted to be since the day I met her, since the moment the words ‘I’m all in’ left her lips on the rooftop the other night.

“Only you could make a brunch invite sound like a request for a lifetime commitment.” “We already have one of those, precious.” I smack her ass, hoping the sting will distract her from the severity coating my words. From the way they try to tell her that our bond is set in stone, etched into the very fabric of time. It was created the day we met in the lobby of Cerros, substantiated by the friendship we’ve built over time, and consummated last night with hours of love making that was about nurturing our emotional connection as much as our physical one.

“I see you, Nadia. I see the woman in front of me, and I love her.” Tears gather in my eyes and skate down my cheeks. He wipes them away and continues. “I see the hurt and traumatized woman lurking in the shadows of your eyes, and I love her. I see the woman I’ll build a future with, and I love her. I see my wife, the mother of my kids, the partner I’ll trust with everything and deprive of nothing, and I love her. I love you. I know everything there is to know about you, and what I don’t know I’ll learn. You don’t have to run from me, Nadia, and you don’t have to be scared. I don’t just want the polished, perfect version of you. I want the broken one too. I want every version of you because every version of you belongs with me.”

“Now you see why I didn’t want to share. Sometimes you have to hold your own sadness, keep your own secrets, carry your own pain.” “When you were alone in the world, that might have made sense, precious, but you’re not alone anymore, which means your sadness is my sadness, your secrets are my secrets, and your pain—” he kisses me again, slow and long as if he’s trying to leech the pain from my system with his lips “—your pain is my pain.”

“Hey, man, you don’t want to do this,” Beau’s voice shakes, and I laugh again because he has no idea, does he? He doesn’t know that I’ve been dreaming of this moment since before I even knew his name or the sorry story of his life. He doesn’t know that the moment I laid eyes on Nadia, the threads of our fates intertwined, and I became her justice and his reckoning.